Country: USA
Language: English
Genre: Modern Fiction
Publisher: Cannongate Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2012
Fictional Artist:
Artist: The Demonics, The Fakes
Genre: Rock
Country: USA
Real World Analogue: The Demonics were based on Television, while The Fakes were more derived from Big Star. Nik himself is based on 13th Floor Elevators' Roky Erickson, Guided by Voices' Robert Pollard and lo-fi/experimental musician Jandek.
Jacket Blurb:
Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create—in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.
In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate.
Dana Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative writer” (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone Arabia—riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful—reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.
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